I have been reading blogs from various sources, such as blogs on SSC, and on sqlblog.com etc. However on all these blog sites, I find that there is no collective efforts (from the blog hosting site) to promote a common brand for the site, instead, individual blogger only plays his/her own "game".

I have some thoughts on improving the SSC blog site to make it a "premium" site for SQL Server professionals to read resourceful blogs and also to contribute to the site.

1. SSC could provide a list of common tags that each blogger may use and SSC can provide a search function that will retrieve all blogs under the same tag.

The benfit here is that A reader can read all blogs discussing the same topic (i.e. tag) from different bloggers.

2. SSC could market itself as the best blog site for some specific themes (as for which, we need to think hard) by soliciting bloggers to put a specified percent of their blogs to these themes.

Current issue: the blogs on SSC are too diverse in terms of topics/ideas (which is not a bad thing in some way) but on the other hand, there is no "brand" recognition for SSC blog site because of this diversity.

3. SSC needs to cultivate / attract more "heavy-weight" bloggers. A blog site to me is like a mall, each blogger is an individual store in the mall, but in each mall, there must be an anchor store (or several anchor stores) to attract potential buyers. Without an anchor store, the mall will not have much chance to be successful.

Take www.sqlblog.com for example, it is probably the best blog site for

SQL Server related topics as one of its "selling" point is that all

bloggers must be SQL Server MVPs. I know on SSC we also have a few MVPs, but it seems to me the blogs from these MVPs are far from enough (collectively) and also the blog topics are too diverse (to the extent that SQL Server related topics only cover a small percentage, I share the same blame for this as an ordinary blogger)

I believe through the efforts of all SSC'ers, we will make SSC blog site as successful as the SSC main website, and I'd like to see more suggestions regarding the improvements of SSC blog sites.